/ acatholiclife.blogspot.com
Eugenio Pacelli was born in 1876, and was elected Pope in 1939. He came from a familyprominent for its loyal service to the Vatican. He was ordained priest in 1899 at twenty-three. By 1901 he was already entrenched in the Vatican administration. (more…)
A genuine Priest’s Hole / friendswithinchrist.blogspot.com
Martin Luther / evangelicancalvinist.blogspot.com
The death in battle of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden / lookandlearn.com
The British were involved in this nasty episode, though only on the margins. All wars are horribly wasting, but this one could be taken as the best example. It was about religion, which hardly comes as a surprise. It is amazing that most human conflict since the death of Christ has come about because of differences of opinion and dogma, when Christ taught that all men should love each other. How humans have reacted during the centuries after His death is hardly His fault. (more…)
Herbert Asquith in 1908 / an.wikipedia.org
Britain’s industrial revolution was in the eighteenth century, and followed into the nineteen and twentieth. She became super-powerful and rich, but apart from a handful of mine and factory owners, and those estate owners who had anything left to maintain, most workers lived in indescribably poor circumstances in Britain – worst of all in the nineteenth. Thank God for the reformers, the artist Hogarth and Charles Dickens. They showed the great industrial cities as they were – filthy, over-crowded, smelly, fog-ridden, unhygienic and socially divided.
The National Insurance Act was passed to everyone’s surprise by Asquith’s Liberal administration in 1911. It was the first Act of its kind, but it was soon to be copied by most other countries with a strong enough government to see it through, for it was revolutionary indeed. (more…)
Treaty 1814 / ebay.com
Just eighteen months separate two important agreements reached in the city of Paris. After the Allies (Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia) had at last defeated Napoleon, a pact was made with France which, considering the awful damage done to most of Europe, was perhaps over-generous. (more…)
/ en.wikipedia.org
He was the last Chancellor of the Weimar Republic (q.v.), and a high-ranking general in the German army. Even while he was a young officer this Junker was reading works by Machiavelli and becoming the most ardent intriguer, having great influence over President Hindenburg from 1930 to 1933, having the enviable position of liaison officer between the government and the army. (more…)
Lord Salisbury / gatesofvienna.blogspot.com
Kind Hearts and Coronets is probably the best and blackest of the British 1950s comedies written for the screen. The film tells the story of an illegitimate boy who grows up determined to become a Duke, because his biological father is an aristocrat who refuses to help or even recognise the boy’s poor mother. And become a Duke Dennis Price does, by killing off eight members of a ducal family (all played by a spectacular Alec Guinness) who must be dispatched for him to acquire the title. Each of his victims is called ‘Gascoyne’. It is very likely that the film’s screenwriter was thinking of a certain marquesate when he wrote this name, precisely the Gascoigne-Cecils, one of whom was called Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoigne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury. (more…)
William II, Emperor of Germany (the Kaiser) came on a visit to England in 1908, and stayed for a while with Colonel Stuart-Wortley. After one of their conversations the latter wrote a letter/ article for the Daily Telegraph newspaper revealing what the Kaiser had said to him, no doubt after a fulfilling luncheon. (more…)
What Grand Fleets used to look like / en.wikipedia.org
Why ‘curious’? Because the first was agreed between Britain and Germany only fourteen years before the outbreak of a world war, the first of its kind. And the second was signed only four years before the next one. (more…)